The humble brick has housed us for thousands of years, but how much longer will it endure?
'I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,' Caesar Augustus apparently boasted. If so, he wasn鈥檛 the only person to dismiss the humble brick. They鈥檝e housed us for tens of thousands of years. They are all rather similar 鈥� small enough to fit into a human hand, and half as wide as they are long 鈥� and they are absolutely everywhere. Why, asks Tim Harford, are bricks still such an important building technology, how has brickmaking changed over the years, and will we ever see a robot bricklayer?
Last on
Image credit
Sources
Hannah B Higgins, The Grid Book p25, MIT Press 2009
James W.P. Campbell and Will Pryce, Brick: A World History, Thames and Hudson, London 2003
Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, Poor Economics XXXX
Edward Dobson and Alfred Searle, Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles 14th Edn 1936, (The Technical Press, London)
Broadcasts
- Sat 11 May 2019 04:50GMT大象传媒 World Service except East and Southern Africa & South Asia
- Sat 11 May 2019 13:50GMT大象传媒 World Service News Internet
- Sun 12 May 2019 14:50GMT大象传媒 World Service News Internet
- Sun 12 May 2019 21:50GMT大象传媒 World Service except East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa
- Sun 12 May 2019 22:50GMT大象传媒 World Service East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa only
- Mon 13 May 2019 03:50GMT大象传媒 World Service South Asia
Podcast
-
![]()
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
The stories of inventions, ideas and innovations which helped create the economic world
